About

• Location London, United Kingdom Job Summary Imagine what you could do here. At
• Apple, new ideas become great products, services, and customer experiences
• quickly. Bring focus, rigor, and leadership to your team and shape the evolution
• of Apple’s Kafka ecosystem. Apple is seeking an experienced engineering manager
• to lead an established team responsible for building, contributing to, and
• managing the core Apache Kafka infrastructure that powers Apple’s critical
• services. This team develops, maintains, and scales Kafka internally while
• actively contributing to the upstream open-source project. Your work will impact
• all users of Apple products and services and ensure the reliability,
• performance, and evolution of Apple’s messaging platforms.

• DESCRIPTION

• Apple’s Kafka organization develops messaging systems that are reliable,
• scalable, and performant. The team maintains Apple-scale deployments while
• contributing to Kafka internals, brokers, client libraries, replication, fault
• tolerance, partitioning, and system optimizations. As a leader, you will manage,
• mentor, and grow engineers responsible for both internal platform needs and
• upstream open-source contributions. You will oversee technical execution,
• maintain engineering standards, and ensure operational excellence across the
• Kafka ecosystem.

• MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

• Comprehensive experience in software development, with a deep understanding of
• distributed systems or messaging platforms at scale. Technical leadership
• experience overseeing complex projects and multiple engineers. Direct people
• management experience mentoring and growing engineering teams. Proven track
• record of building and leading infrastructure teams with credibility and
• influence. Proficiency in Java, Scala, or other languages used in Kafka
• development. Advanced understanding of algorithms, data structures, fault
• tolerance, and performance for large-scale messaging systems.

• PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

• Deep knowledge of Kafka broker internals, replication, partitioning, client
• libraries, and event delivery guarantees. Familiarity with distributed systems
• concepts such as consensus protocols, consistency models, and fault tolerance.
• Experience with multi-datacenter deployments, load balancing, quota management,
• and tenant isolation. Strong background in testing methodologies, including
• fault injection, property-based testing, and performance benchmarking. Ability
• to drive operational excellence, including monitoring, incident response, and
• long-term remediation strategies. Experience contributing to open-source
• projects, ideally Apache Kafka or related ecosystems. Hands-on expertise with
• Apache Kafka internals and distributed system design. BS, MS, or PhD in Computer
• Science or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.